Can it run ray tracing? Find out with ‘Neon Noir,’ a free ray tracing benchmark from Crytek based on the ray tracing demo of the same name, which was made available as a video at GDC 2019. The benchmark can be downloaded from the CRYENGINE Marketplace, and it will give a score to the user based on how their system performs rendering scenes produced by CRYENGINE’s new ray tracing feature in real-time.
The ray tracing technology that features in Neon Noir is both hardware and API agnostic and enables ray tracing to run on most mainstream contemporary AMD and NVIDIA GPUs. The feature is an extension of CRYENGINE’s prized SVOGI rendering tool currently used in Crytek’s games, including Hunt: Showdown. Developers around the world will be able to use this advanced alternative to other ray tracing methods, which are typically bound to GPU solutions with dedicated RT cores, when the feature ships in the next major CRYENGINE update in 2020.
The future integration of this technology in CRYENGINE will be optimized to benefit from performance enhancements delivered by the latest generation of graphics cards from all major manufacturers and will support APIs like Vulkan and DX12.
To accompany the launch of the benchmark, Crytek has released a Neon Noir developer diary featuring some of the key members of the team involved in spearheading this technology. The video explains how Crytek’s new ray tracing technology was developed, the inspiration behind the scenes created for Neon Noir, and reveals how this technology will empower artists and developers using CRYENGINE to achieve stunning results by deploying ray tracing on contemporary hardware.
Neon Noir follows the journey of a police drone investigating a crime scene. As a drone descends into the streets of a futuristic city, illuminated by neon lights, its reflection is accurately displayed in the windows it passes. The drone model also has self-reflecting properties on various surfaces, such as its wings. Further demonstrating how ray tracing can deliver a lifelike environment, neon lights are reflected in the puddles below them, street lights flicker on wet surfaces, and windows reflect the scene opposite them accurately. Showcasing the benefits of real-time ray tracing, screen-space reflections were not used in Neon Noir.
Ray tracing is a rendering technique that simulates complex lighting behaviors. Realism is achieved by simulating the propagation of discreet fractions of energy and their interaction with surfaces. CRYENGINE’s new ray tracing feature simplifies and automates the rendering and content creation process to ensure that animated objects and changes in lighting are correctly reflected with a high level of detail in real-time. This eliminates the known limitations of pre-baked cube maps and local screen space reflections when creating smooth surfaces like mirrors, and allows developers to create more realistic, consistent scenes. CRYENGINE’s implementation is a highly customizable and flexible system, which gives designers the control to specify exactly where they want to achieve the highest performance, and where they want the highest quality, to ensure a balanced and optimized scene.
Recommended Minimum Specs for the Neon Noir Benchmark:
- AMD Ryzen 5 2500X CPU/Core i7-8700
- AMD Vega 56 8 GB VRAM/Nvidia GTX 1070 8 GB VRAM
- 16 GB System Ram
- Win 10 x64
- DX11
The benchmark includes ‘Ultra’ and ‘Very High’ settings, demonstrating how CRYENGINE’s ray tracing solution can be adjusted. When this technology ships in CRYENGINE, developers will be able to adjust the value that drives this setting to achieve the level of performance they desire for specific scenes or give control over the performance of ray tracing to users as part of the graphics settings.
Crytek is proud to partner with Razer, the leading global lifestyle brand for gamers, and Neon Noir fully supports Razer Chroma RGB effects on dedicated hardware, previewing a feature integration that will be made available to CRYENGINE users in the near future.
Developers everywhere can harness the power of CRYENGINE today by visiting www.cryengine.com.